Usage of unscheduled hospital care by homeless individuals in Dublin, Ireland: a cross-sectional study.

Objectives: Homeless people lack a secure, stable place to live and experience higher rates of serious illness than the housed population. Studies, mainly from the USA, have reported increased use of unscheduled healthcare by homeless individuals.We sought to compare the use of unscheduled emergency department (ED) and inpatient care between housed and homeless hospital patients in a high-income European setting in Dublin, Ireland.

Point of care hematocrit and hemoglobin in cardiac surgery: a review.

The use of point-of-care blood gas analyzers in cardiac surgery has been on the increase over the past decade. The availability of these analyzers in the operating room and post-operative intensive care units eliminates the time delays to transport samples to the main laboratory and reduces the amount of blood sampled to measure such parameters as electrolytes, blood gases, lactates, glucose and hemoglobin/hematocrit. Point-of-care analyzers also lead to faster and more reliable clinical decisions while the patient is still on the heart lung machine.